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EFF in the News

EFF in the News

EFF in the News

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), these videos are being removed because of YouTube's automated Content I.D. system, which allows copyright owners to disable any videos that contain its content--regardless of whether the videos may be legitimate because they contain other elements. Many of the parodies are still up, as YouTube's Content I.D. system is not perfect--but it's probably only a matter of time before the filtering system hunts them down and removes them.

For example, its attempt to force Twitter to turn over "customer or subscriber account information for each account registered to or associated with Wikileaks" prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to challenge the government's rights without a search warrant.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that jailbreaking one's iPhone should be allowed, even though it required one to bypass some DRM and then to reuse a small bit of Apple's copyright firmware code. Apple showed up at the hearings to say, in numerous ways, that the idea was terrible, ridiculous, and illegal. In large part, that was because the limit on jailbreaking was needed to preserve Apple's controlled ecosystem, which the company said was of great value to consumers.

"We actually don't really know who their clients are," said Peter Eckersley, Technologist of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "So, they may be selling this technology to banks, they may be selling it to on-line advertising companies, and that's the bigger concern."